The Night in Question - Susan Fletcher ***(*)

By Brian Clegg

This is a bit of an oddity – it was given to me on the assumption that it is a mystery so I would like it, and there is a mystery element, but the main focus (and certainly the best part) involves an 87-year-old woman looking back over her life.

Florence Butterfield is a woman from an ordinary background, but who has an extraordinary life, which is dipped into through her memories in a non-linear fashion. Susan Fletcher is clearly adept at this kind of writing, handling it well and giving Florrie some remarkable events to remember, through to the point when due to an unlikely accident with mulled wine she ends up losing a leg, in a wheelchair and moving into the assisted living part of a care home, where the key event of the mystery takes place at midsummer. The manager of the home, Renate, plummets from her third floor window with Florrie as the only witness. The manager’s life is on a thread in a coma, and the assumption is made that it was a suicide attempt. But Florrie is not sure.

Here’s where the mystery element comes in – or at least one of the two mystery elements. The other is that there is something nasty in the woodshed from when Florrie was 17 that is hinted at every few pages for nearly all of the 400-page book. Frankly, this teasing of what happened gets tedious. The main mystery is more interesting – was Renate pushed, by whom and why? But I’m afraid this part of the book does not play to Fletcher’s strengths. The two key twists in the plot were reasonably obvious: in the first case, Florrie and her Dr Watson-like friend draw entirely the wrong conclusion from a clue, even though the reality is readily apparent. In the second, they fail to notice a totally straightforward possibility. As far as I can see, the only reason for the apparently bright Florrie missing these points for so long is that the book wouldn’t be long enough to fit in all the reminiscing otherwise.

I quite enjoyed The Night in Question, though during some of the diving into the past I did feel ‘Please, let’s get back to the mystery.’ – but if you enjoy an ‘extraordinary and unexpected life slowly revealed’ novel and aren’t too worried about the mystery side, this would very satisfactorily hit the spot.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.